Description
The poet of boxes, unpacked at last. Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell is the biography the reclusive genius deserved: Cornell (1903–1972), the Queens shut-in who never left New York yet traveled the universe in his shadow boxes — the most poetic objects in American art, built from dime-store dreams.
Solomon — who writes about art like a novelist — traces the strange, beautiful life: the Utopia Parkway house, the ballet dancers he worshipped from afar, the assemblages that turned longing into art. It is lonely, luminous, and quietly heartbreaking: the portrait of a man who made intimacy out of distance.
One of the great artist biographies: delicate as its subject. For Cornell lovers and anyone who has ever made art from longing. Exquisite. Solomon’s Cornell is heartbreaking and beautiful in equal measure. One of the finest artist biographies ever written — delicate, precise, and profound.
Few artists were as mysterious as Joseph Cornell — the reclusive, self-taught genius who never left New York yet built entire worlds inside small wooden boxes. In Utopia Parkway, acclaimed art critic Deborah Solomon delivers the definitive biography of one of America’s most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists.
Named for the quiet Queens street where Cornell lived his whole adult life, Utopia Parkway traces the artist’s journey from a job as a textile salesman to the center of the avant-garde: his dreamlike shadow boxes and assemblages, his friendships with the Surrealists, his obsessive devotion to his disabled brother Robert, and the private rituals that shaped his art.
Drawing on a decade of research and unprecedented access to Cornell’s archives, Solomon paints an intimate portrait of a man who turned longing into art. Essential for art lovers and biography readers alike, Utopia Parkway is the story of an unlikely master — and the strange, beautiful universe he left behind.
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